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Photo by James Brosher

FTC senior attorney Lesley Fair showed students examples of deceptive advertising during her visit last week.

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The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection’s senior attorney Lesley Fair visited associate professor Anthony Fargo’s classes last week to talk about deceptive advertising and freedom of commercial speech.

"There is no journalism without advertising," said Fair in J300 Communications Law. She gave students instances of how editorial content is dependent on advertisements. She threw light on commercial speech, its constitutional protection and the regulation of deceptive advertising.

Fair is a distinguished lecturer at Catholic University Law School, where she has been named Outstanding Adjunct Professor by the Student Bar Association. In addition, she is a lecturer at the George Washington University Law School.

Fair narrated various cases of false advertising by brands and the FTC’s fight against them. Students were surprised to hear of cases like ice cream ads that use mashed potatoes displayed as vanilla ice cream.

Fair also stressed how health products have been under the spotlight for false advertising. She showed ads and discussed them with the class. One of them was the KFC ad in which a bucket of fried chicken was portrayed as healthy food, playing up the wrong nutrition details.

In the last part of the class, Fair talked about certain commercial speech cases and asked the students to guess the solutions.